Thermal methods of solid fuel processing: review

Abstract

A review of literature data on the processing of solid types of combustible fossils into liquid fuels and chemical products has been carried out. The reserves of solid fossil fuels far exceed the natural resources of oil and gas, so the development of methods for processing solid fossil fuels into chemical products and liquid fuels is an urgent task. The main methods of processing coal and oil shale (OS) are reduced to pyrolysis and supercritical gasification. Pyrolysis is preferred for processing oil shale into shale oil, and currently a promising method for processing coal is extraction with supercritical solvents such as water and CO 2 at temperatures up to 900 °C and in some cases with the addition of a catalyst. For oil shale, the gasification process, like pyrolysis, is carried out under milder conditions, since the mineral part of oil shale contains trace elements that act as catalysts, and the structure of the organic part of oil shale is more similar in composition to oil.